White (15 page)

“No. I just didn't expect this many.” He had to find what he could about the Raison Strain. “Do you know if they are in any order? I would like to look at the one that deals with the Great Deception.”

“No, there is no order,” Ciphus said. “They were put in place by men who don't read. I thought we'd established that.”

“Where did Qurong find them?”

Neither answered.

He looked at Chelise. “You don't know? How could he come into possession of so many Books without a record of where he found them?”

“He says that Elyon showed them to him.”

“Elyon? Or was it Teeleh?”

“When I was younger he said Teeleh. Now he says Elyon. I don't know which, and frankly, I don't care. I'm interested in what they say, not where they came from.”

“What they say can only be understood by first understanding where they came from. Who wrote them.”

“This is your great secret?” Ciphus asked. “You're going to tell us that the only way to read these Books is through your understanding of Elyon? Then don't waste our time.”

“Did I say that Elyon wrote them?”

“Do you know who wrote them?” Chelise asked.

He'd sparked some interest in her.
Speak carefully, Thomas. You can't
afford to turn Ciphus against you.

“Where are the blank Books?”

“The blank Books?” Chelise glanced at Ciphus. “I don't care about the blank Books. I can read empty pages as well as you.”

Ciphus averted his eyes.

“Then show me the Book you have open,” Thomas said.

She let her eyes linger on him, then walked gracefully toward the desk. He followed with Ciphus at his side.

Only he knew that this woman held his fate in her hands. He had to find a way to win her trust. But watching her step lightly across the wood floor, he felt a sliver of hope. Suzan had seen something in her eyes, and he was quite sure he'd seen it too. A longing for the truth, maybe.

Chelise rounded the desk and lowered her hand to the open page. Her eyes studied the page briefly, then rose to meet his. How many times had she looked longingly at these Books, wondering what mysteries they held?

“I leave this one open,” she said.

“Why this one?”

“It's the first Book I looked at when I was a child.”

Thomas glanced down at the open page. English script. He could read the writing perfectly well. They couldn't know that, except for
The Histories
Recorded by His Beloved
and the one Book he'd opened in Qurong's tent, this was the first Book of History he'd read as well.

“And if I can read this Book—if I can tell you what it says—what will you give me?”

“Nothing.”

“My death is Woref 's wedding gift to you. Wouldn't you think that the life of the man who can read these Books to you would be more of a gift than his death?”

She blinked.

“I'll have no part in this!” Ciphus said. “You said nothing—”

“It's okay, Ciphus,” Chelise said. “I think I can speak for myself. Your life is meaningless to me. Even if you can read this Book, which you haven't shown me, you would be useless to me. I couldn't stand to stay in the same room with you long enough to hear you read or learn to read. Years of curiosity have brought me here tonight, but this will be the only time.”

The air seemed to have been sucked out of the room. Thomas wasn't sure why her words crushed him, only that they did. He'd faced death before. Although her words were the death sentence to this foolish plan of his, the pain he felt wasn't about his own death. It was about her rejection of him.

“Ciphus has promised me life,” he said.

“I said that I would present your case. It will be Qurong who determines your fate, not Chelise. You're a fool for thinking otherwise.”

It was at least a lingering hope, but the words fell flat.

He nodded and walked around the desk.

Chelise knew that her words had cut him, and she found it rather surprising. What could he possibly have expected? He knew that he was an albino. He knew that his defiance of her father would earn him a death sentence, and yet he persisted in the defiance.

If Ciphus had not been present, she might have said the same thing with less of a bite. Although it was true, the thought of being alone with any albino for long made her nervous. Even nauseated.

She watched him walk around the desk, crestfallen. To think that this man had once defied the great Martyn and even Woref. He looked anything but the warrior now. His arms were strong and his chest well muscled, but his eyes were green and his skin . . .

What would it be like to touch skin so smooth?

She dismissed the thought and stepped aside to give him room. He could have taken the Book from the other side of the desk just as easily. Instead he walked closer to her.

She was being too sensitive. He undoubtedly hated her more than she hated him. And if he didn't, he was a fool for misunderstanding her revulsion of his disease.

Thomas reached his hand to the page and followed the words at the top. The writing was foreign to her, but he read aloud as if he'd been reading this language all of his life.

“Kevin walked down the road slowly, drawn to the large oak at the end of the street,” he read. “He was quite sure that his heart was breaking, and the knowledge that his mother would never have to work again did nothing to help heal the wound.”

He lifted his hand, but his eyes scanned on, reading.

“What does it mean?” Chelise asked.

“It's a story about a boy named Kevin.”

“Not the histories?”

“Yes. Yes, it's the history of Kevin's life, written in story form.”

“In story form?” Ciphus said. “We don't write histories in story form. This is childish.”

“Then maybe you should think like a child to understand,” Thomas said. “The boy's just lost his father, and the life insurance is meaningless to him.”

Chelise wasn't sure what he meant by life insurance, but the story spoke to her. Something about the simplicity perhaps, the emotion, even the way that the albino had read it had electrified her.

“What's the rest?”

“The rest?” Thomas was turning pages. “It would take me hours to read you the rest.”

“How do we know that you're not just fabricating this story?” Ciphus demanded.

“You'll have to learn to read them yourself. Or you, Chelise. What if I could teach you?”

“How?”

“By becoming your servant. I might be able to teach you to read them. All of them. What greater humiliation could Qurong heap upon me, his greatest enemy, than to chain me to a desk and force me to translate the Books? Killing me is too easy.”

“Enough!” Ciphus snapped. “You've made your point and it's useless. Please, if you don't mind, I insist that you leave us. I won't have him spouting his lies anymore. Qurong would never approve.”

Chelise stilled a tremble in her hands and bowed her head. “I will leave, then.”

Ciphus calmed his voice. “But before you do, could you kindly show me where the blank Books have gone to. They aren't on the shelf where I last saw them.”

“Of course.” She walked to the bookcase where the volumes were kept. She'd seen them just three days earlier.

“This way. I don't know what you could possibly want with Books that have . . .”

She stopped halfway across the room. The bookcase was empty. From floor to ceiling, where hundreds of Books had once rested collecting dust, only empty shelves stood.

“They . . .” She looked around quickly. “They're gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? They can't just disappear.”

“Then they've been moved. But I just saw them a few days ago. I didn't think anyone had been in here since.”

Thomas looked stricken. “How many were there?”

“Hundreds. Maybe a thousand.”

“And they're just . . . gone?”

“Where could anyone hide so many Books?” Ciphus asked.

They were both reacting oddly. What was it about these blank Books?

“What does this mean?” Ciphus asked Thomas.

“Without the Books, it means nothing,” the albino said.

Ciphus glared at him. “Then you will die in three days.”

14

I
really don't care if we only have four
hours
, Ms. Sumner. We don't slow down at this point.” He was addressing her on the speakerphone.

“I understand, Mr. President.”

The president had allowed Kara to stay in the White House, where she'd observed the chaos from as close as she dared, which was mostly in the halls and on the perimeter. Until Thomas's plane arrived in a few hours, she was out of her league.

The president had asked her to come in with Monique an hour earlier while they hammered through the antivirus issue for the hundredth time. They'd been on the phone with Theresa Sumner for the last ten minutes. None of her news was good. Par for the course—
none
of the news Kara had heard over the past twenty-four hours, since the phone call from Thomas, had been good. Defense, intelligence, health, interior, homeland security, you name it—they all were crawling the walls.

To make matters worse, Senate Majority Leader Dwight Olsen was reportedly behind a protest outside the White House. At last report over fifty thousand campers had vowed to wait the White House out in a silent vigil. It had turned into a spiritual gathering of the strangest kind. A sea of somber faces and shaved heads and robes and those who wanted shaved heads and robes.

They'd burned candles and sung soft songs last night. The swelling crowd was flanked by several hundred reporters who'd managed to put aside the normal clamor for this silent waiting of theirs.
Give us some news,
Mr. President. Tell us the truth.

Front and center was the grand master of ceremonies, the CNN anchor who'd first broken the story. Mike Orear. With less than ten days to go, he'd become a prophet in the eyes of half the country. His gentle voice and stern face had become the face of hope to all whose religion was the news, and to many more who would never admit such a thing.

Reporters called it a vigil for all men and women of all races and religions to pray to their God and appeal to the president of the United States, but anyone watching for more than an hour knew it was simply a protest. The crowd was predicted to swell to over two hundred thousand by tonight. By tomorrow, a million. It was turning into nothing less than a final, desperate pilgrimage. To the headwaters of the peoples' troubles and hopes.

To the White House, where at this very moment the president and his government were running on fumes, trying to put out a thousand fires and turn over a thousand stones, desperate to head off disaster and find that elusive solution.

At least that was how Kara saw it.

She looked around at the ragged men in whose hands the world had been forced to put their trust. Secretary of Defense Grant Myers was still bleary-eyed over the nuclear exchange between Israel and France. They'd persuaded Israel not to launch and to play along with France's offer for an open-sea exchange, but the Israeli prime minister was taking a whipping in his own cabinet for that decision. None of them knew Thomas, Kara thought. The recommendation to play ball with France was precipitated by information from Thomas Hunter.

Phil Grant, director of the CIA, listened intently, slowly massaging the loose skin on his forehead. Another headache, perhaps. Within ten minutes he would get up and take more aspirin. She wasn't sure what to make of Phil Grant.

The chief of staff handled most of the communication coming to and going from the president, a steady flow of interruptions that Blair handled with a split mind, it seemed. The rest gathered there were key aides.

Kara couldn't imagine a man better suited to deal with a crisis of this magnitude than Robert Blair. How many people could juggle so many issues, maintain their overall composure, and also remain completely human? Not many. She didn't think any president could truly shed the political skin that earned him the office, but Blair seemed to have. He was genuine to the bone.

President Blair stood and spoke to Kara. “I need Monique with Thomas, at least long enough for us to flesh this thing out. She'll be at your full disposal the minute she's free. Jacques de Raison is on a flight from Bangkok now with several hundred promising samples, as you know. I need those samples in the right hands. As it turns out, I can't think of anyone more qualified to coordinate this than you. Do you disagree?”

“No, Mr. President. But I'm exhausted.” Her voice sounded as if it were in a drum. “And to be perfectly honest, I don't share your optimism. I've spoken to Mr. de Raison about the samples, and they would require a month to analyze—”

“I don't care if you need a year to analyze them! I need it done in five days!”